How to: Use Vine to Extend Your Brand’s Social Media Reach

Vine is a social video app that was developed by Twitter and launched in January. The app is effectively a video version of Twitter because it only allows for you to create brief 6-second looping videos. At first it sounds boring, but it gets oddly addictive trying to create a perfect looping clip. Vine seems to be doing well and catching on fast because, just like Twitter, it’s an extremely simple concept that’s very easy to use.

Twitter just announced that Vine has crossed the 13 million, which shows just how fast the medium is growing. Twitter also just released Vine on Android yesterday which means that almost everybody who uses a smartphone has the ability to create a quick 6-second video story.

A new medium always brings marketing challenges to light, which is why we decided to give you a few tips on how to effectively use Vine to promote your brand:

Highlight Work Place Culture: Work place transparecy is a fantastic way to gain trust with your customers, and Vine could very well be the perfect tool to promote the culture in your office. You’ve got ping pong in your office? Why not let the world know you have fun in the office by showing off a six-second loop of employees throwing down on the ping pong table.

Show Product Teasers: Six seconds is the ideal amount of time to show off a new product or service in the pipeline. Releasing new product teasers every so often is an easy way to generate buzz around something that’s about to be launched. An example of a product teaser that has been executed very well is when Taco Bell began teasing the debut of its Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos. The fast food chain also used the branded hashtag #coolranchDLT when creating promotional Vine’s for the tacos, making it easy to brand fans to contribute and browse Cool Ranch-related Vines.

Get Brand Fans Involved: Crowd participation is an obvious trend in social media marketing at the moment and it isn’t likely to go away because it’s VERY effective. A simple question can yield many responses and give your brand a lot of reach across multiple social networks. An example of how you can get brand fans to get involved is by launching a contest. Earlier this year Urban Outfitters launched a Vine contest with Converse that encouraged brand enthusiasts to submit six-second documentaries highlighting a day in the life of their Converse’s. To enter, you just had to tag the video with #yourchucks and the winner won items from both Urban Outfitters and Converse.

Be sure to follow us on Vine as we experiment with it. Our username is @namedotcom.

In honor of Vine launching for Android, we thought we’d make a video explaining why developers prefer Android:
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